I’m pleased to announce that we have our winners for our first ever Short Story Competition. We opened the competition back in the spring of 2012, in which time we received 174 qualifying entries, on a range of bingo related subjects. The stories covered a range of styles and ideas including humour, horror, raunch, romance and more. Along the way there was more than the odd murder, a good few laughs and the odd watery eye, all in all the team here were thoroughly entertained during the judging.
We drilled the entries down until we had a short list of 15 stories, when we let our guest judge Rachel Trezise have the tricky job of deciding the final winners. Well, it was no easy task but she placed the winners in to the top 4 prize positions. She also she commented on the high quality of the entries she had to judge and the entertaining range of styles and stories.
Without further ado, here are the list of winners – you can click through to read the stories as well:
- 1st place (£300 Prize): Graham Curtis – A Secret Delight
- 2nd place (£100 Prize): Chloe Dalton – The Cuckoo
- Runner up (£50 Prize): Dominic Delargy – Buzzword Bingo
- Runner up (£50 Prize): Arabella Chippindall-Higgin – Game Of Chance
All the winners have been notified and responded, the cheques are in the post! We’d like to thank everyone for taking part and submitting their stories. Over the next few months we will be adding all the entries to the site. We currently have the short listed stories and winners up and you can visit and read them over in the 1st Playing Bingo Short Story Competition section of the Creative Corner.
Our judge Rachel Trezise had this to say about the entries.
“It was incredibly difficult to choose just one winning short story from the selection I was given. All fifteen stories have something to offer in terms of entertainment, writing quality, humour and the power to engage. The top four placed stories have a combination of all four of these things. The two runner-ups, Buzzword Bingo and Game of Chance, set in an office and a dystopian world respectively, seem to catch something of the zeitgeist; bosses full of hyperbole and Hunger Games-style bingo assassinations. In second place, The Cuckoo is a wonderfully crafted piece of fiction that made me feel as though I was myself experiencing an oppressively hot July in 1980’s Hounslow. The winning story, A Secret Delight, I simply love because it’s so warm, fast-paced, and gripping. Plus it manages to cut through the snobbery that exists around bingo without ever appearing callous.”
My plan is to bring the winners and short-listed stories together in a print anthology in the near future. We will also re-run the competition again in the future, as it’s been a great means of generating some bingo related stories and culture for the site and for bingo fans everywhere. However if you missed out on our prose competition but fancy getting poetical, then we have just launched a new creative competition, The 1st Playing Bingo Poetry Competition. Yeah! We’re running the poetry competition on a shorter time scale than the short story one, so I think we will wait for the results of that, then combine both the poetry and prose in one great big bingo themed print anthology, with maybe some other creative stuff in there.
Why some of you will be asking? Why all this creative stuff, it’s bingo isn’t it, a bit low-brow for art and stuff? Well, I say no and I’m doing my bit to put the game firmly up there in the realms of creative endeavour. Too long it’s been marginalised and ignored in cultural fields, and I’m doing my bit to right that wrong. And this is just the start, we’ll be doing a lot more in coming years to get bingo on the cultural map, but more on that at a later date. At the moment, enjoy the great stories about the game, and get poetical and enter our new poetry competition!
